Famous Last Screams

Michael Howard

There have never been lacking prophets, from Isaiah onwards, to proclaim the end of war, though the more recent of these have not postulated the Second Coming as a necessary condition for achieving it. Some have suggested that the more terrible war becomes, the more quickly it will die out, and, like Alfred Nobel, have devised more destructive weapons in order to hasten the process. Others, from Kant onwards, have suggested that since war is conducted only by unrepresentative élites, it will gradually disappear as democracy extends its sway throughout the world. Yet others see the best hope of its extinction in the universal imposition of a benevolent hegemony by right-minded people calling itself a ‘New World Order’.

Such prophets are sometimes unfortunate in their timing. The radical publicist H.N. Brailsford, in his book The War of Steel and Gold, declared in the spring of 1914 that there was no longer any serious danger of war between the Great Powers of Europe. At the beginning of 1939, Sir Samuel Hoare happily declared that the world was entering an Age of Gold. So when Martin van Creveld tells us, not, admittedly, that war as such is about to cease, but that ‘large-scale conventional war ... may indeed be at its last gasp,’ he must expect, in spite of his formidable reputation as a military historian, to be greeted with a certain degree of scepticism.

Dr van Creveld has been almost as unfortunate in his timing as H.N. Brailsford. Within a few months of the appearance of this book in the United States, the Gulf War erupted. It did not last long, but it involved forces totalling nearly a million men, equipped on both sides with highly destructive weapons, and resulted, albeit somewhat one-sidedly, in casualties in the order of tens if not hundreds of thousands. Further, it was for the victors a remarkably successful use of large-scale force as an instrument of policy, whether one approved of that policy or not. For the British edition of the book Dr van Creveld has made some last-minute changes, suggesting that the war was ‘the last scream of the American eagle’: but it has to be said that his thesis now looks less convincing than it may have twelve months ago. G.K Chesterton once described a popular and inexpensive pastime known as ‘Cheating the Prophet’, which consisted simply in listening to wise men forecasting what would happen and then doing exactly the opposite. People are still quite good at playing that particular game.

Whether right or wrong, however, Dr van Creveld’s prognosis is based upon an interesting and original analysis. It shares some characteristics with the ‘Nobel’ school in suggesting that weapons have now become too terrible to be used as instruments of policy. In spite of the best efforts of American think-tanks, no one has yet come up with any convincing suggestions as to how to fight a war with nuclear weapons that would not involve mutual suicide. Nor is it clear how nuclear-armed powers can fight a conventional war that would not escalate to a nuclear one. Further, the increasing sophistication and expense even of conventional weapons has made their price far exceed their utility.

Letters

Michael Howard (LRB, 5 December) should cheek his sources. Kant did not say that war ‘will gradually disappear as democracy extends its sway through the world’. On the contrary, he maintained that war would continue until it ceased to be feasible and cost too much – two conditions that have now come to pass in the West. ‘If a reed is bent too far it breaks; and he who wants too much gets nothing’ (quoting a colleague). And: ‘The spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people and it cannot exist side by side with war. And of all the powers (or means) at the disposal of the State financial power can probably be relied on most. Thus states find themselves compelled to promote the noble cause of peace, though not exactly from rules of morality.’ The full text of his paper ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795) is easily available.

Michael Howard writes in your issue of 5 December: ‘there have to be odds of some kind to distinguish war from a simple massacre. This was what made the destruction of an undefended Dresden troubling in a way that earlier attacks on German cities were not.’ I spent the winter of 1945-6 as a British Army officer in Dortmund. The inner city was said to have been 98 per cent destroyed. Whether that figure was accurate or not I had no means of knowing, but there was very little standing above ground. The Germans with whom I worked said that most of the damage had been caused in the last three weeks of the war, when Dortmund had no defences against air attack. There was a belief among the occupiers at that time that those responsible for bombing strategy wished the ground troops to find the greatest possible amount of destruction, to demonstrate the decisive role of bombing in the defeat of Germany. I found, and find, that thought troubling.

A recent controversy has shown that the question is still delicate. I well remember the atmosphere in Britain from 1940 onwards; I remember watching with satisfaction and gratitude the massive formations flying overhead to carry out what were called the thousand-bomber raids on Germany. How much were we all inspired by a sentiment Michael Howard does not mention: a burning and unreasoning desire for vengeance? Living afterwards amidst the rubble, I could not help wondering how effective the mass bombing of cities was, such as the fire raids on Hamburg. The moral question is profoundly difficult and cannot be resolved, but the practical assessment is still worth making, in order to convince future warlords, while hoping that they will never exist, that what is not sporting is not useful either.